I am not new to freebsd, but since FreeBSD 2.8 when I had my first experience, I leave and come back a few times and with different PCs. I always like it a lot, but there was always something that made me give up. This was because I am not a server runner, but a desktop runner.
This time I'm back with my Toshiba A200 laptop and FreeBSD 7.1-Beta2. I happy with it. Wine works fine to run that windows apps that I am used to, win4bsd also runs because of the apps that dont run with wine, I have sound, wireless (with a belkin usb device), good graphics, etc etc etc...
The things that I not so happy with are:
- acpi: I am really a newbie in this... I dont think its working very well. I dont even know how to look at cpu temperatures, I not able to check battery with that nice windowmaker dock apps and so on... But until now I did not see any smoke out of the laptop.
- my intel 4965agn wireless device dont work. But I read that soon in FreeBSD 8 it will work. So I will wait...

My next sptep i going to be a system update. I a bit nervous... not really with buildworld, but with the ports upgrade, because I not so comfortable with portupgrade.

I was wondering if some of you have some experience with acpi and toshiba laptops that could share with me.

Thanks. My FreeBSD knowladge is probably not so good as yours, but fell free to ask something about my system configuration.

And there's always the ubiquitous mbmon port that can get CPU temps, MB voltages, and fan speeds ... if the MB has any supported monitoring chips.

You may need to load some smbus modules to get the full range of monitoring capabilities. Have a read through /usr/src/sys/<arch>/conf/NOTES and /usr/src/sys/conf/NOTES for which smbus-related modules to try loading. (<arch> is i386 for 32-bit installs, and amd64 for 64-bit installs.)

I did acpiconf -i 0 and I was able to see data from the battery. This was nice!
But how can I be sure that I can have my laptop running just on battery without the fear of a unexpected system shutdown? Because last time I did it, a few minutes after boot, the system just switch off without any kind of alert.